Ubud Writers Festival

Thursday, 13 November 2008

At the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali last month I did a Wanderlust travel panel with three other writers and a women in the audience drew us:

• Jamie James – chairs the session, a former New Yorker writer who now runs a restaurant in Seminyak, along the coast from Kuta. He’s just written a novel Snake Charmer based around snake expert Joe Slowinski. Described, by other herpetologists (snake experts), as ‘an accident waiting to happen,’ Slowinski finally got his fatal snake bite (a multi-banded krait) in Burma. And on 9/11.
• Martin Amanshauser – Austrian travel journalist, so from Vienna I guess, whose columns have been compiled into Logbuch Welt – Logbook World – he’s very funny.
• Ariel Leve – Jewish New Yorker who writes the Cassandra column in the Sunday Times in London. Her ‘hopeless with the unfamiliar’ schtick is very funny as well.

The lady who draws us (sorry, I can’t find your name!) makes Ariel look very prissy. ‘Well that’s what she was pretending to be,’ she declares.